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Artist Dan Llywelyn Hall, who is also from Barry, said: "It started out when I went to do the portrait of 'Johnny' Johnson and when I was working on it I thought he was conscious he didn’t want all the limelight so it went from there.”

Dan was even more amazed when he found out Gordon Yeo was from Barry.

He said: “When I discovered it I thought it was amazing. It was moving to hear the story.

“In the portraits they all seem to have a sense of anticipation. They didn’t know what they were going into. There were a lot of unknown things and you can see it in their photographs.

“It’s a powerful thing to look at and work on.”

The memorial came about after members of the 617 Squadron Netherlands Aircrew Memorial Foundation, who have tended the airmen's graves for years, raised £4,300.

The group posted on Facebook: "It was such a great day, very emotional and memorable. Among those attending where people from the 617 Squadron Association, Netherlands Airforce, Royal Air Force, relatives of the AJ-A crew (6 crew members had relatives there) and the British Embassy.

"We had a memorial service on the beach with about 300 people attending. After the service we had a flypast of the Dutch Historical Flight - two Harvards.

"Then we had lunch with 90 guests and after that we went to Bergen cemetery. Such a beautiful day."

Why Operation Chastise has gone down in history

Operation Chastise culminated in the daring low-level raids on three dams in the heart of the industrial Ruhr valley in Germany.

Guy Gibson handpicked a brand new squadron called 617 for the mission on May 16/17, 1943.

Eight of the 19 Lancasters that attacked the German dams were shot down, 53 aircrew were killed and three taken prisoner and around 1,600 civilians including more than a thousand forced labourers perished in the resulting floods.

The aircraft flew at 60ft to drop Barnes Wallis' bouncing bombs. The Mohne and Eder dams were breached and the Sorpe slightly damaged in the raid, which aimed to halt Nazi weapons production.

The raid was immortalised in the 1955 film The Dam Busters.

'Johnny' Johnson told Lincolnshire Live: "I enjoyed my war. My reason for joining was to help get rid of Hitler and everything he stood for.